My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [60]
• Hire a lawyer (or bribe a friend studying for the bar) to draft a nasty letter, as photographer Dani Weiss did (see Chapter 12). Here’s where that written contract of everything you and the client agreed to comes in handy.
• If things get really bad, take your client to small claims court, which you don’t need a lawyer to do. For details on how it works, how much it costs (not much), and how much you can sue for (usually just several thousand dollars, though amounts vary from state to state), Google “[your county] small claims court.” There’s no guarantee you’ll get the money you’re owed, even if you win your case, but sometimes the threat of court alone is enough to get a client to cough up the cash.
PROBLEM: Your Client Won’t Stop Monkeying with the Deadline
Despite the contracts you carefully negotiate with your clients, scheduling delays, cancellations, and snafus do happen. Even if your client is a spreadsheet-loving type-A sort, she may have a disorganized boss, vendor, or customer who throws a wrench in her schedule, and thereby yours. If, as a result, a project you’ve “reserved time for” on your calendar gets held up by three weeks or is suddenly due two weeks earlier than you agreed to in the contract, you’ve got a problem. Ditto if the project now requires you to work when you’d otherwise be sleeping, vacationing, or attending your sister’s wedding.
The last time this happened to me (okay, admittedly it was cutting into my vacationing and not a wedding—though I did once sneak off to finish an article during a rehearsal dinner), I thought I had only two options: (1) play the hero and save the day, even if it meant working overtime and skimping on sleep, or (2) point to the terms specified in the contract and hold firm, even if it meant losing the work. As I’d been trying to infiltrate the client for several months and was hot to prove myself on what sounded like a fun project, I chose—cue wrong-answer buzzer—door number one. What did this mean for me? That when the client sent me the two-hundred-page document they hired me to rewrite on July 1 rather than on June 1 as they’d promised, I said “Sure, I can still do it.” Never mind that I’d been twiddling my thumbs that June waiting for the job to come through and was already booked for another full-time freelance gig in July.
Stupidly, I convinced myself that caped crusaders worked till 4:00 AM and gave up their July (the one guaranteed sunny month in Seattle) in the name of climbing the freelance ladder. Equally naive, I’d signed a contract that didn’t compensate me for such client delays. Meaning I needed to do the gig, however late, because I needed the money. Not surprisingly, I quickly came to resent the project and developed an out-of-control Red Bull habit, neither of which made me feel like much of a superhero.
SOLUTION: What I failed to realize at the time was that there was a third option. I could have remembered that the boss of my schedule is me, not my client. In exchange for me “reserving” all of June for my client, which required me to turn away other work, I should have insisted the contract compensate me financially for the reserved time, regardless of whether the work came through. Then it would have been easier to walk off a project I no longer had time to do.
If you can accommodate a client’s jumping schedule without losing sleep, money, or your mind, go for it. But aside from being clear with clients on how much lead time you need for your work, what can you do to prevent crazy monkey deadlines from messing with your sanity and bank account?
• Charge a rush fee of 25 to 100 percent of the project price, depending on the hairiness of the schedule. What constitutes a “rush job” is up to you. For me, it’s anything that requires me to work more than eight hours a day or over holidays and weekends.
• Specify a nonrefundable deposit in your contracts, applicable toward the project payment but yours to keep if the client cancels or reschedules the job. Depending on the work you do, this can vary widely.